Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Ryuichi Tamura

Human Houseby Ryuichi Tamura

I guess I'll be back lateI said and left the housemy house is made of wordsan iceberg floats in my old wardrobeunseen horizons wait in my bathroomfrom my telephone: time, a whole deserton the table: bread, salt, watera woman lives in the waterhyacinths bloom from her eyeballsof course she is metaphor herselfshe changes the way words doshe's as fre-form as a catI can't come near her name

I guess I'll be back lateno, no business meetingnot even a reunionI ride ice trainswalk fluorescent underground arcadescut across a shadowed squareride in a mollusk elevatorviolet tongues and gray lips in the trainsrainbow throats and green lungs undergroundin the square, bubble languagefoaming bubble information, informational information adjectives, all the hoolow adjectivesadverbs, paltry begging adverbsand nouns, crushing, suffocating nounsall I want is a verbbut i can't find one anywhereI'm through with a societybuilt only of the past and futureI want the present tense

Because you open a doordoesn't mean there has to be a roombecause there are windowsdoesn't mean there's an interiordoesn't mean there's a spacewhere humans can live and die-so far I've opened and shuteountless doors, going out each oneso I could come in through anothertelling myself each timewhat a wonderful new world lies just beyondwhat do I hear? from the paradise on the other sidedripping waterwingbeatswaves thudding on rockssounds of humans and beasts breathingthe smell of blood

Bloodit's been a whileI'd almost forgotten what it smells likesilence gathers around a screamon the tip of a needleas he walks slowly toward methe surgeon puts on his rubber glovesI close my eyes, open them againthings falling through my eyesboth arms spread like wingshair streaming out full lengththings descending momentary gaps of lightconnecting darkness and darkness

I rise slowly from a table in a barnot pulled by a political slogan or religious beliefit's hard enough trying to find my eyesto see the demolition of the human housethe dismemberment of my language

My house, of course, isn't made of wordsmy house is built of my words

tranlated by Christopher Drake

My Imperialismby Ryuichi Tamura

I sink into bedon the first Monday after Pentecostand bless myselfsince I'm not a Christian

Yet my ears still wander the skymy eyes keep hunting for underground waterand my hands hold a small bookdescribing the grotesqueness of modern white society

when looked down at from the nonwhite worldin my fingers there's a thin cigarette-I wish it were hallucinogenicthough I'm tired of indiscriminate ecstasy

Through a window in the northern hemispherethe light moves slowly past morning to afternoonbefore I can place the red flare, it's gone:darkness

Was it this morning that my acupuncturist came?a graduate student in Marxist economics, he says he changedto medicine to help humanity, the anime of animals, drag itself peacefully to its deathbedforty years of Scotch whiskey's roasted my liver and put meinto the hands of a Marxist economistI want to ask him about Imperialism, A Study-what Hobson saw in South African at the end of the nineteenth centurymy yet push me out of bedeven if you wanted to praise imperialismthere aren't enough kings and natives leftthe overproduced slaves had to become white

Only the nails growthe nails of the dead grow tooso, like cats, we must constantlysharpen ours to stay aliveOnly The Nails Grow-not a bad epitaphwhen K died his wife buried him in Fuji Cemeteryand had To One Woman carved on his gravestonetrue, it was the title of one of his booksbut the way she tried to have him onlyto herself almost made me cryeven N, who founded the modernist magazine Lunawhile Japan prepared to invade Chinagot sentimental after he went on his pension;F, depressedS, manic, buildds house after houseA has abdominal imperialism: his stomach's colonized his legsM's daaf, he can endure the loudest sounds;some people have only their shadows growothers become smaller than they really areour old manifesto had it wrong: we only looked upwardif we'd really wanted to write poemswe should have crawled on the ground on all fours-when William Irish, who wrote Phantom Lady, diedthe only mourners were stock brokersMozart's wife was not at his funeral

My feet grow warmer as I readKotoku Shusui's Imperialism, Moster of the Twentieth Century, written back in 1901when he was young N wrote "I say strange things"was it the monster that pumped tears from his older eyes?

Poems are commodities without exchange valuebut we're forced to invade new territoryby crises of poetic overproduction

We must enslave the natives with our poemsall the ignorant savages under sixtyplagued by a surplus of clothes and food-when you're past sixtyyou're niether a commoditynor human